Of Time and the River (137 page)
Now, as suddenly as it had begun, that wonder died: the life of the town, the people, the old Countess and her friends, which had for a few days seemed so new, strange, and interesting, now filled him with weariness and distaste. He was suddenly fed up with the provincial tedium of the town, he felt the old dislike and boredom that all dark bloods and races could awake in him an importunate and unreasonable desire, beneath these soft, dull skies of grey, for something bright, sharp, Northern, fierce, and wild, in life— for something gold and blue and shining, the lavish flesh of great blond women, the surge of savage drunkenness, the fatal desperation of strong joy. The dark, strange faces of the Frenchmen all around, and all the hard perfection of that life, at once so alien and so drearily familiar, the unwearied energies of their small purposes fixed there in the small perfection of their universe, so dully ignorant of the world, so certain of itself, filled him suddenly with exasperation and dislike. He was tired suddenly of their darkness, their smallness, their hardness, their cat-like nervousness, their incessant ebullience, their unwearied and yet joyless vitalities, and the dreary monotony of their timeless greed.
He was tired of Orléans, tired of the Vatels; most of all tired, with a feeling of weary disgust and dislike, of the old Countess and all the small tricks and schemings of her life.
And with this sudden weariness and distaste, this loss of interest in a life which had for a week or two devoured his interest, the old torment and unrest of spirit had returned. Again the old question had returned in all its naked desolation: “Why here? And where shall I go now? What shall I do?” He saw, with a return of the old naked shame, in a flash of brutal revelation, the aimless lack of purpose in his wandering. He saw that there had been no certain reason, no valid purpose, for his coming here to Orléans, and with a sense of drowning horror, as if the phial of his spirit had exploded like a flash of ether and emptied out into the formless spaces of a planetary vacancy, he felt that there was no purpose and no reason for his going anywhere.
And yet the demons of unrest and tortured wandering had returned with all their fury: he knew that he must leave, that he must go on to some other destination, and he knew nowhere to go. Like a drowning man who clutches at a straw, he sought for some goal or purpose in his life, some justification for his wanderings, some target for his fierce desire. A thousand plans and projects suggested themselves to him, and each one seemed more futile, hopeless, barren than the rest. He would return to Paris and “settle down and write.” He would go back to England, get a room in London, go to Oxford, the Lake District, Cornwall, Devon—a thousand towns and places, evoked by a thousand fleeting memories, returned to argue some reasonable purpose for his blind wandering. Or he would go to the South of France, “to some quiet place,” or to Switzerland, “to some quiet place,” or to Germany, Vienna, Italy, Spain, Majorca,—always “to settle down in some quiet place”—and for what? for what? Why, always, of course, “to write,” “to write”—Great God! “to write,” and even as he spoke the words the old dull shame returned to make him hate his life and all these sterile, vain pretensions of his soul. “To write”—always to seek the magic skies, the golden clime, the wise and lovely people who would transform him. “To write”—always to seek in the enchanted distances, in the dreamy perspectives of a fool’s delusions, the power and certitude he could not draw out of himself. “To write”— to be that most foolish, vain, and impotent of all impostors, a man who sought the whole world over “looking for a place to write,” when, he knew now, with every naked, brutal penetration of his life, “the place to write” was Brooklyn, Boston, Hammersmith, or Kansas—anywhere on earth, so long as the heart, the power, the faith, the desperation, the bitter and unendurable necessity, and the naked courage were there inside him all the time.
Now, having agreed to accompany the Countess on her visit to the Marquise, he suddenly decided to leave Orléans at the same time, spend the night at Blois, and go on to Tours the next day, after visiting Mornaye. And with this purpose he packed his bag, paid his bill at the hotel, and set out on the appointed day with the old woman who for two weeks now had been his self-constituted guide and keeper.
XCV
The village of Mornaye was a small and ancient settlement, similar to thousands of others, situated near the gate of the château from which it got its name. A man was waiting for them at the station with a motor car: they got in and were driven swiftly through the town—a dense cluster of old grey-lemon buildings with tiled roofs, a thatched one here and there, the shops of the village grocer, cobbler, baker, visible through small dormer windows, some farm buildings, a fleeting glimpse of the old cobbled court yard of a barn, some wagons and farm implements—a little universe of life, compact, unbroken, built up to the edge of the road—and then, almost immediately, the gates of the château.
They drove through the gates and down a long and stately avenue of noble trees, and presently came to a halt before the great entrance of the château. As they approached, a footman came swiftly down the steps, opened the door of the car, and bowed, and in another moment, led by the man, they had entered the hall and were being escorted into the great salon where their hostess was awaiting them.
La Marquise de Mornaye was a woman of about sixty, but from the energy and vigour of her appearance she seemed to be in the very prime of life. She was an extraordinary figure of a woman, as tall and strong-looking as a man, with a personal quality that was almost mountainously impressive in its command. The image of the boy’s recent discontent had so shaped the French as a dark and swarthy people of mean stature that it was now startling to be confronted by a woman of this grand proportion.
She had a wide, round face, smooth, brown and unwrinkled, such as one often finds in peasant people; her eyes were round, bright, and shrewd, webbed minutely by fine wrinkles at the corners. She had strong, coarse hair of grey, brushed vigorously back from a wide, low forehead. She was big in foot and limb and body, everything about the woman was strong, large and vigorous except her hands. And her hands were plump, white, tiny, as useless-looking as a baby’s, shockingly disproportionate to the power and vigour of the rest of her big frame.
The woman had on a long, brown dress that completely covered her from neck to toe: it was a strangely old-fashioned garment—or, rather, it did not seem to have any fashion or style whatsoever— but it was, nevertheless, a magnificent garment, in its plain and homely strength perfectly appropriate to the extraordinary woman who wore it.
In every respect—in word, tone, gesture, look, and act—the woman showed a plain, forceful, and immensely able character. Her strong, brown face was friendly, yet shrewd and knowing; she greeted the Countess cordially, but it was evident from the humour in her round, bright eyes that she was no fool in the ways of the world and perfectly able to hold her own in any worldly encounter.
She was waiting for them, erect and smiling, as they entered the great salon, a magnificent room at least forty feet in length, warmly, luxuriously, yet plainly furnished, and with nothing cold or repellent in its grand proportions. She greeted the Countess immediately and cordially, extending her plump little white hand in a friendly greeting, and bending and kissing the little wren-like woman on her withered cheek. La Marquise, in deference to her young American guest, spoke English from the beginning. And her English, like everything else about her, was plain, forceful, and direct, completely fluent, although marked with a heavy accent.
“‘Ow are you, my dear?” La Marquise said, as she kissed the other woman on the cheek. “It is good to see you again after these so many years. ‘Ow long ‘as it been since you were last at Mornaye?”
“Almost seven years, Marquise,” the Countess answered eagerly. “The last time—do you remember?—was in the spring of 1918.”
“Ah, yes,” the other answered benevolently. “Now I can remember. You were here when many of our so brave Américains were quartered here at Mornaye—Monsieur,” she said, using this reference as an introduction, and turning to the boy with her plump little hand extended in a movement of kindly greeting, “I am delighted. I meck apologies for my son. I know he will so much regret not seeing you.”
He flushed, and stammered out his thanks: she seemed to take no notice of his embarrassment and, having completed her friendly welcome, she turned smilingly to the Countess again, and said:
“And ‘ow ‘ave you been, my dear? You are looking very well,” she said approvingly, “and no older dan you were de lest time you were here. I s’ink,” she said smilingly, including the young man now in her friendly humour—“I s’ink la Comtesse must ‘ave discover—wat you call it, eh?” she shrugged—“ze se-CRET of ze fountain of yout’, eh?”
“Ah, Marquise,” the Countess fawned greedily upon the grand woman, obviously elated by these signs of intimacy—“ah—hah—hah! it is so kind of you to say so—but I fear I have grown much older since I saw you last. I have known great trouble,” she said sadly, “and, as you know, Marquise, my health has not been good.”
“Non?” the other said with an air of solicitous inquiry. “I am so sor-REE,” she continued in a tone of unimpeachable regret, which nevertheless showed that the Countess’s health or lack of it was really of no moment to her whatever. “Perhaps, my dear, it is ze wretchet cleemat here. I s’ink perhaps you should go Sout’ in vintaire—ah, monsieur,” she continued regretfully, turning to the youth, “you see Mornaye at a bat season of ze year—I fear you may be disappointed by our coun-TREE. I ‘ope you vill come beck some time in sprink. Zen, I s’ink you vill agree la France is beautiful.”
“I should like to,” he replied.
“But oh, zis vintaire! Zis VINTAIRE!” La Marquise cried with passionate distaste, folding her arms and drawing herself together in a movement of chilled ardour as she looked through a tall French door across one of those magnificent and opulent vistas that one finds in France, an architecture of proud, comely space into whose proportionate dimensions even nature herself has been compelled. It was a tremendous sweep of velvet sward, that faded into misty distances and that was cut cleanly on each side by the smoky denseness of her forest parks. Her shrewd eyes ranged across this noble prospect for a moment in an expression of chilled distaste. Then, with a slight contracted shudder of her folded arms, she turned, and said wearily:
“Ah, zis vintaire! Zis VINTAIRE! Sometimes I s’ink it vill nevaire end. Every day,” she went on indignantly, “it rain, rain, rain! All vintaire lonk I see noz-ZING but rain! I get up in ze mornink and look out—and it rain! I turn my beck and zen look out again—it rain! I take a nep, I get up, I go to bet—always it rain!” She shrugged her shoulders comically and turning to the boy with a glint of shrewdly cynical humour, she said, “I s’ink if it keep on ve ‘ave again—vat you call it?—Noah’s Floot, eh?”
The Countess clucked sympathetically at this watery chronicle of woe, and said:
“But have you been here by yourself all winter? I should think you would get awfully lonely, my dear,” she went on in a tone of ingratiating commiseration. “I know how you must miss your son.”
“No. I vas in Paris for two veeks in Decembaire,” said La Marquise. “But it rain zere too,” she said, with another shrug of comic despair, and then added vigorously, “No! I do not get lonely if it do not rain. But ven it rains—zen it is tereeble. . . . Come,” she said brusquely, almost curtly, turning away from the grey prospect through the window, “let us seet here vere eet ees varm.” Still clasping her arms across her breast, she led them towards a coal fire which was crackling cheerfully in a hearth at one end of the great room; they seated themselves comfortably around the fire, La Marquise rang a bell, and spoke a few words to a butler, and presently he returned, bringing glasses and a decanter of old sherry on a tray.
They sat talking amiably then of many things. La Marquise questioned the boy about America, his stay in France, the places he had seen, referred regretfully again to the absence of her son and of the great friendship he cherished for America and Americans as a result of his travels there with Marshal Foch. And from time to time, the Countess, with a cunning that was comically naďve in its barefaced self-exposure, would prod him with a skinny finger, and whisper hoarsely:
“Ask her some questions, my dear. You should ask her more questions and write more in your little book. It will make a good impression.”
And although he saw from the glint of shrewd humour in the sharp eyes of La Marquise that none of this clumsy by-play had been lost on her, and that the other woman’s design was perfectly apparent to her, he responded dutifully, if awkwardly, asking respectful questions about the age and history of the château, the extent of its estate, and so on. At length, emboldened by the modest success of these beginnings and feeling that a clever young journalist should display an intelligent curiosity about the current affairs of the nation to which he is a visitor, he asked a question about the government of the period, of which Herriot was the leader and which was dominantly socialist.
It was, he saw, an unfortunate move; the Countess poked him sharply with a warning finger, but it was too late. He saw instantly that his question had produced a bad impression on La Marquise: for the first time, her manner of amiable and cordial friendliness vanished, her face hardened, there was an angry glint in her shrewd eyes, and in a moment she said harshly, and in a tone of arrogant impatience:
“I know nozzing about zose pipple! I pay no attention to anys’ing zey say! Zey are fools! fools!” she cried violently. “You must not believe anys’ing zey say! Zose men are traitors! . . . Charlatans! . . . Zey are ze pipple who have ruined and betrayed France!” In her agitation she got up and walked across the room. “Here!” she cried, picking up a newspaper on a table and returning with it. “Here is what you should reat if you want ze trut!” She thrust a copy of L’Action Française into his hands. “Zat paper— and zat alone—will tell you ze trut about ze way s’ings are in France today. Ah, monsieur!” she cried earnestly, “you do not know—ze world does not know—no one outside of France can know ze trut, because zese wretched men control ze press—and make it print vatever lies zey tell it to. But you reat ZIS, monsieur—you reat ZIS,” she struck the paper with the back of her hand as she spoke, “and you will get ze trut! Ah, zat man!” she said with a grim chuckle of admiration. “Ze rédacteur—ze—vat you say?—ze EDITOR of zat paper, Léon Daudet—ah, zat man is RIGHT!” she said with a chuckle of satisfaction. “Zat man is sometimes coarse—he call zem bat names—he is not always trčs gentil—but,” again she chuckled grimly, “he iss RIGHT! He tells ze trut—he calls zem vat zey are— ze traitors and creemiNALS who ‘ave ruined France.” She was silent for a moment, and then in a voice harsh with passion, she said violently: “La France, monsieur, is a royaume—a--vat you call it?—a monarchy—a kinkdom. Ze French people must have a kink—zey are lost vitout a kink—zey cannot govern zemselves vitout a kink! . . . Zere can be no France, monsieur, vitout a kink!” she almost shouted. “Zere has been no France since ze monarchy vas destroyed by zese scélérats who ‘ave betrayed La France—zere vill never be a France until ze kink is restored to his rightful office and zese creeminals and traitors ‘ave been sent to ze guillotine vere zey belonk. . . . So do not ask me anys’ink about zese men, monsieur,” she said with arrogant passion. “I know nozzing about zem. I pay no attention to zem! Zey are fools . . . traitors . . . creeminals,” she shouted. “You reat zat paper, you vill get ze trut.”